I have made no secret of my distaste for the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, one of the painters in the Impressionist circle most appealing to popular taste today.

When I heard that Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Director Colin Bailey, a recognized authority on Renoir (1841-1919), makes a persuasive case for the artist, I proposed a walk-through of "Intimate Impressionism From the National Gallery of Art," now at the Legion of Honor, which includes a roomful of Renoirs. Bailey agreed.

As evidence that interpretation of Renoir is not settled, whether or not opinion is, Bailey gestured to a hazy 1879 landscape. "If you had come here two weeks ago, you'd have seen that this painting had a different title," he said. "It was called 'The Vintagers' and was thought to show a grape harvest. But I published the picture in 2007 or '08 and showed that this is a group of mussel fishermen coming up from the sea to unload their catch. We're in Normandy, not in wine growing country, and mussel gathering was part of normal activity there. We can identify the topography."

The painting's label now reads "The Mussel Harvest," a discrepancy that Bailey speculates may be due to the National Gallery not having updated its database.

So Bailey has the scholarly clout to tweak the canon.

But Renoir's titles - many of which were assigned and sometimes altered later by others - and his subject matter concern me less than his aesthetics.

The saccharine qualities of his color and his pictures' sentiment are cloying to my eyes.

'Image of modernity'

Bailey and his curators seem to have anticipated that sort of response by hanging an 1872 portrait of Claude Monet so that we encounter it first among the eight Renoirs on view.

The picture has an earthbound quality and an earthy palette, I said, and it seems very specific in making the painter's relationship to the sitter felt even before we know any of the background details.

"I wrote a book on Renoir's portraits," Bailey said, "and he is remarkably attentive to the presence of all his sitters, but is not constrained by that. What you've said (about his Monet portrait) I think you could say about many, many of his portraits."

Monet appears smoking a pipe and reading. "The pipe is a trope, Courbet-like," Bailey said, "showing Monet as a man of the people. Renoir signs it very prominently, showing that this is a finished work. There's an affection in the intensity of the gaze, the choppy quality of the bushy beard, the meticulous attention given to the eyebrows, and the smoke is a modern trope, too, another image of modernity."

At last, a Renoir soaked with feeling but free of false sweetness.

"I think the date is a little later than the date the Washington catalog gives it," Bailey said. "I think this is a moment when the two have come back together and the Impressionist movement is about to begin. It hasn't begun yet, so this is an image full of solidarity."

Animals in detail

That makes it exceptional in my view, but Bailey differs.

He pointed first to Renoir's very freely worked portrait of Madame Monet and her son on a lawn, made during a visit to the Monets at Argenteuil, on a day when Edouard Manet was also present, painting the same subjects alongside him. "The sense of a vision passing, of a glimpse, that's what I think he's capturing here," Bailey said.

To my eye, the most striking and convincing detail in the outdoor double portrait is a rooster that appears as an interloper in the picture. It and the gently writhing cat in Renoir's "Woman With a Cat" (circa 1875) suggest that Renoir excelled less at portraying people than other animals.

But Bailey offered crucial context for "Woman With a Cat" and a couple of other ostensible portraits here.

"When you say 'animal demeanor,' " as I just had in characterizing the picture's subject, "you touch on something that in its moment would so easily have been rendered animal," Bailey said.

In the writing of Renoir's friend and contemporary Emile Zola, Bailey said, "when he talks about the girls of Montmartre, he sort of makes them into beasts. Renoir won't."

What appear to be portraits are actually genre pictures, Bailey noted.

"Renoir could not work without a model," he said. "This young woman is probably a shopkeeper's assistant working as a model. The young woman with a cat is an old trope of sensuality, of libido. But here there's something less disturbing. There's the feeling of sensuousness, of the body of the animal and its fur, and the beautifully described and very elegant hands. Again with his rainbow palette to render the flesh. ... With the amount of shoulder, neck and arm showing here - in the hands of a lesser artist, this could have been mawkish and something more of a come-on. But there's a sort of sweetness and innocence in a subject that otherwise had a whole background of being licentious."

Focus on social context

My teachers were formalists. To them - and me -Renoir appeared indifferent to Impressionism's key innovation: the prizing of touch, color and pictorial surface energy over subject matter and tradition.

As Bailey pointed out in conversation, evaluative emphasis shifted in the 1980s and '90s - led by a Marxist art historian. T.J. Clark, UC Berkeley professor emeritus - to the social content embedded in the Impressionists' artistic decisions. I welcomed that shift, as it rhymed with my own intensifying attention to social context in contemporary art. But Bailey has spanned the divergence in styles of interpretation more thoroughly than I have, and it has left him with a deeper view of Renoir's authenticity than mine. Damn.